1. Field of the Invention
The field of the invention is data processing, or, more specifically, methods and products for managing power consumption of a computer and computers for which power consumption is managed.
2. Description of Related Art
The development of the EDVAC computer of 1948 is often cited as the beginning of the computer era. Since that time, computers have evolved into extremely complicated devices. Today's computers are much more sophisticated than early systems such as the EDVAC. Computers typically include a combination of hardware and software components, application programs, operating systems, processors, buses, memory, input/output devices, and so on. As advances in semiconductor processing and computer architecture push the performance of the computer higher and higher, more sophisticated computer software has evolved to take advantage of the higher performance of the hardware, resulting in computers today that are much more powerful than just a few years ago.
Computer systems today may consume a large amount of power and generate a large amount of heat. To control power consumption and heat generation of computers, operating system (‘OS’) and computer processor designers have implemented power management techniques that are carried out by the OS, like the Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (‘ACPI’) modules of most modern operating systems. Such OS-based power management techniques, manage power consumption of a computer in dependence upon the performance of the computer processor. Other power management techniques have been implemented in computers in software not executing as part of the OS. In fact, such non-OS-based power management techniques are typically implemented in software executing on a processor, such as a service processor, that is not the computer's primary processor. Such non-OS-based power management techniques manage power consumption of a computer processor only in dependence measured temperature, current, power values, and the like, not in dependence upon the performance of the computer processor. While both the OS-based and non-OS-based may manage power consumption in one computer concurrently, there is currently no cooperation between such OS-based power management and non-OS-based power management techniques. As such, OS-based and non-OS-based power management techniques often conflict in managing power consumption of the computer system.